Commonly mistaken for a type of management where employees are encouraged to contribute ideas towards identifying organizational improvements (such as cost-cutting measures), participative management is one of the most important as well as most widely utilized strategies for developing organizations.
It is rooted in the concept of servant leadership, a type of management in which employees at all levels are given greater control and coordination of the basic activities and functions of the enterprise. Decisions are taken through inclusion of every one of those who will be affected by them.
The principle is simple: workers gain more satisfaction and work better when in a supportive environment. The difficult comes when managers are required to share information, delegate authority, and confer responsibility identify and set organizational goals to front-line employees.
Delegating decision-making and distributing responsibility requires trust and courage, which in turn require involvement and vulnerability. Because of this, participation requires more effort and a higher level of emotional development.
Related Resources
Show Summaries
Learn to empower your dev teams to help them create better products and free up some of your time.
An empowered development team owns its work, is authorized to make the right decisions, and is able to work independently. Empowered teams are happier, create better products, and allow you, the person in charge of the product, to spend more time on product discovery and strategy. This article by Roman Pichler shares five tips to help you empower your development teams.
Neuroscience reveals the social nature of the high-performance workplace.
How do leaders give others a feeling of safety even in uncertain environments? With a basis in neuroscience, David Rock shares how spontaneity (rather than feeling suppression) leads to a sense of relatedness and fairness, how intelligence can relate to low self-awareness, and how leaders can create the kind of atmosphere that promotes status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.
The 5 Scrum values take center stage
In 2016 updates were released to the Scrum Guide, which at the time already had six years of experience under its belt. The update was a simple one, adding the 5 values of Scrum to the Guide: Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness. Dave West shares why these values that may appear obvious, are actually really difficult to adopt in most ‘traditional’ organizations.